In this guest post, Dr Deborah Fromm and Prof Gareth Jones describe the results of the international seminar “Money and Politics in Unequal Cities: Analytical Insights from The Global South,” which was funded by USF.
Income and wealth inequality have grown in many countries in the last decade. These inequalities are most visible in cities and are arguably related to the form of urban growth. As we know, many of the most unequal cities in the world, according to the Gini coefficient, are concentrated in the so-called Global South. Cities like Johannesburg, São Paulo, Manila, or Nairobi, regardless of their innumerable cultural, demographic, and political differences, are recognized for their socio-economic disparities, urban infrastructure problems, and high rates of violent crime.
Setting out to promote South-South analysis and encourage a discussion about emerging urban service markets and new zones of resources accumulation in the South was the main intellectual goal of the workshop ‘Money and Politics in Unequal Cities: Analytical Insights from The Global South’, funded by the Urban Studies Foundation (USF) and organized by Deborah Fromm, Gareth Jones and Morgan Carmellini. The workshop was hosted by the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) on the 17th and 18th of June and brought together urban researchers from Ecuador, India, Brazil, China, Argentina, South Africa, Serbia, Ghana, Indonesia and the Philippines to reflect on the production of cities and the marketisation of urban services in their interfaces with economic interests, social conflict and political disputes.
This 2-day workshop was held in hybrid format and put together six roundtables followed by a final session of conversation about the Urban Studies journal with Michele Acuto, Managing Editor of the journal. Most of the presenters were urban researchers from the USF community who were involved in the International Fellowship Scheme (new international fellows, current trustees, and mentors).
The presentations addressed central themes in contemporary urban studies, notably, the frontiers between legal and illegal markets, the interfaces between sustainability and exploitation, the tensions around development practices, new infrastructures, and everyday life. The participants were invited and motivated to reflect on the role of money in their own analytical objects and to establish a more comparative approach, positioning their own cases in contrast to the others.
The opening roundtable, ‘City-making in neoliberal times: Money, Inequalities and Globalisation’ was composed by Alison Brown (Cardiff University), Jeroen Klink (UFABC), Hyun Shin (LSE), and Loraine Kennedy (EHESS), and discussed new neoliberal trends in urban planning, specifically applied to the urban governance of informal services and the political economy of urban development.
The closing roundtable, ‘New directions in urban studies,’ was composed by Gareth Jones (LSE), Austin Zeiderman (LSE), Jordana Ramalho (UCL), and Kasia Paprocki (LSE), and reflected on the centrality of conviviality and power relations to apprehend macro and micro contemporary urban dynamics, especially the everyday life in urban peripheries and the local impacts of the appropriation of natural resources and the development of new huge urban infrastructures.
The USF International Fellows (2023-2024) also presented their projects and received feedback from the audience.
Zhengli Huang examined Chinese transports infrastructures projects in Kenya and questioned if they enhance connectivity or urban bypassing. She reflected on the processes of commodification of infrastructure through public-private partnerships and how Chinese finance in African infrastructure is about prioritizing short-term goals over long-term visions (See also: Huang and Lesutis 2023).
Sarita Pillay Gonzalez analyzed the expansion of commercial real estate in post-apartheid Johannesburg. Based on her interviews with developers, she reflected on the relationship between state and real estate, the nebulous boundary between the private and the public, and the impacts on spatial inequality (See also: Gonzalez 2023).
Deborah Fromm explored the financialisation of urban security services through the analysis of the expansion of insurance products offering financial protection against urban violence risks in Brazilian cities. She explored the relationship between financial actors and institutions, particularly insurance companies, with the ‘street world’ and violent crime. Concentrating on the stolen cars and cargo market, she demonstrated the process of entrepeneurialization of state law enforcement actors, the grey zones between public and private spheres, and legal and illegal markets (See also: Fromm 2023).
Harsh Mittal presented the Indian smart city assemblages and their implications for the spatialization of power. He made us reflect on how power is working in the wake of increasingly mobile urban policies that force policy actors to respond to extra-local considerations and showed empirical data on the emergence of new forms of cooperation in smart urbanism and how private actors seduce city administrators in the enactment of smart cities discourse (See also: Mittal et al) .
Mercedes Najman discussed the socio-urban integration capacity of new social housing projects in Buenos Aires, emphasizing its impacts on the beneficiary’s daily mobility and possibilities of access to the city. (See also: Najman 2024).
Andrea Carrión talked about the implications of the trend to climatize urban policies in the Andean Region. She analyzed climate action plans and the challenges that the implementation of a disaster risk agenda poses to urban governance (See also: Carrión et al 2023).
Snehashish Mitra reflected on the displacements of tribal communities in Northeast India and their mobilizations to counter evictions, obtain legal titles, and claim urban citizenship. The migration flows from rural areas produced the expansion of informal hill settlements and environmental contestations, as well as the formation of new Indigenous identities (See also: Mittra 2023).
Aleksandra Dordevic unfolded the good in urban development practices in Serbia. She is developing her project based on three assumptions: “I: Contemporary theories and critical perspectives of planning theorists that link ethics and planning in the 21st century provide sufficient knowledge and theoretical viewpoints on how to judge what is good in planning; II) The systematization of theoretical knowledge and the creation of a critical platform that links ethics and planning enables the creation of a normative basis for better reasoning in urban development practice; III) It is possible, based on the defined normative basis, to create a conceptual model for analyzing value judgments about what is good in urban development practice, thereby contributing to the improvement of planning legitimacy, the definition of regulatory instruments, and the formation of a platform for project evaluation”.
The workshop was very successful in producing new reflections and opportunities for collaborations between urban scholars working on Global South cities from different academic institutions. The diversity of regions studied and researchers’ origins produced a very creative and intellectually fertile environment for understanding global urban processes and problems in a more relational and transnational way.